He knows I freeze when he does this.
He knows.
And he likes it.
As the last bit of sunlight fades behind him, his gaze drags over me with a deliberate slowness that feels like a hand trailing down my spine.
When his eyes lift back to mine, the taunt is blatant.
He is not afraid of me.
He is not warning me.
He is not leaving.
He is waiting for me to break first.
I don’t know when I step backward, only that he notices instantly. His gaze sharpens, tracking even the smallest movement. He shifts forward a fraction, not enough to bridge the distance but enough to mark it as his choice, a subtle demonstration of control that makes my heartbeat stumble.
I open my mouth to speak, but words catch in my throat. The air thickens, charged with something volatile, something that hums against the edges of my magic.
His voice breaks the silence before I can find mine.
“You need to wake up.”
The quietness of the words does nothing to soften their blow. They seem to settle into the walls, seep into the floor, press into the space behind my ribs. I barely register the shift in his posture before something in his eyes begins to change. The blue dissolves. Not fades, burns, swirling inward before igniting outward in a molten, unnatural gold.
The same gold from my vision.
The same gold that watched me through fire and screaming.
Pain erupts behind my eyes so violently I crumble to my knees, hands flying to my skull as though I could hold it together by force alone. The corridor tilts, the doorway blurs, the torchlight gutters in and out as though reacting to the storm inside my mind.
I try to breathe. I can’t.
A flash of movement cuts through the haze. His arm shifts, pulling back slightly as though restraining himself, or bracing. His sleeve pulls just enough to expose a piece of skin along his forearm, and in that sliver of space I see it:
Ink.
Black.
Serpentine.
A snake coils around his arm, its pattern too familiar, too close to the one etched along my spine. Recognition jolts through me, sharp enough to split the pain with fear. His eyes flare brighter, reacting, or resonating, with whatever just passed between us.
The agony in my skull tears open further, and a new voice slams into the chaos. Liam’s. Not beside me. Not from the hall.
Inside.
I have to make her forget.
His voice spirals through another wave of pain, cracking with panic, echoing with something I cannot fully remember or fully understand. My palms grind harder against my temples as the world splinters into fragments of gold and shadow. My stomach tilts. My vision tunnels. The floor beneath me feels thin, unstable, as though I might fall straight through it.
I squeeze my eyes shut and see the Shadeborne’s glowing stare behind my lids.
I open them and he’s still there, unmoving, watching, not with cruelty, but with an expression far more unsettling,almost as if something inside him strains against what he has just triggered. A faint tremor twitches along his gloved hand. His fingers curl tightly over the snake inked into his skin, the gesture too raw, too human for the creature he’s supposed to be.
Liam’s voice fractures and returns again, frayed, desperate:
